Friday, 26 March 2010

I received a query last week from one reader about good estate agents in the SE11 area. I know that we're desperately trendy (Ha! Ha!) and everybody wants to live in Kennington, Oval and Vauxhall (well, once they work out that they can't afford to rent in Borough), so I'm guessing that some of my readers must have used estate agents to buy/rent their properties. Judging from the piles of agents on the "High Street"(!), who appear to have resisted going bust in these economically challenging times, there are plenty to choose from...

I do realise that in making this request, I'm opening myself up to Estate Agent spam, but can anybody (unrelated, please) recommend an estate agent that they've had a good experience with for either letting/renting or selling/buying in the area.

The danger here is that everything we say is very subjective - with a business like estate agency it is very much dependent on the individual. And the inidvidual staff turnover is high so what was good once wont necessarily be good 6 months later.

Having said that when buying I have had good service from Winkworths in Kennington and would recommend them.

I would not recommend Ludlow Thompson near to Oval tube - bad experiences all round which ultimately meant that we cancelled our house purchase because the service was so poor.

And for renting we had good service from Murray Estates on Stockwell Road (I know out of area but they cover SE11)

My rule now is avoid estate agents with branded cars. Other than that have a look around all of the ones on the high street and see which one offers the best deal/ 'feels' right

I used Atkinson Macleod for my purchase - they were very nice and it went through smoothly.

I did look to buy with Kinleigh as they had the best properties at the time (they seem a little thin on the ground now) but I found one of their estate agents very irritating as he was extremely over familiar and not very professional (maybe it was because I am young). There was the constant use of hurrying tactics and game playing that I just couldn't stand (i.e. never accepting an offer, I put in an offer on 3 places for them to advise the seller not to accept and to go to sealed bids to force up the price) - this happened all 3 times. I really got fed up with the stress of it all.

Atkinson Macleod put far less pressure on and didn't keep messing around with sales tactics. I trusted them a lot more.